by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira
Crusade magazine, Mar-Apr 1996
The regularity with which the various cycles of the liturgical year succeed one another in the Church’s calendar is truly an affirmation of the celestial majesty of the Church. She remains undisturbed no matter how much the events of human history change around her and despite the ups and downs of politics and finances as they continue their disorderly race, for she is above the caprices of human passions.
Above, yet not indifferent. When the sorrowful days of Holy Week are commemorated during times of tranquillity and happiness, the Church, like a solicitous mother, seeks to revive in her children a spirit of abnegation, a sense of heroic suffering, a spirit of renunciation of the triviality of everyday life, a total devotion to ideals that give life a higher meaning. Better than a “higher meaning,” these ideals give life the only meaning there is, the Christian one.
But the Church is not a mother just when she teaches us the great and austere mission of suffering. She is also a mother when, pain and annihilation having reached an extreme, she lets the light of Christian hope shine before our eyes, opening unto us the serene horizons that the virtue of confidence places before all true children of God.
Hence, even amid the sadness of the contemporary world, Holy Church uses the vibrant and most chaste joys of Easter to highlight the triumphal certainty that God is the Supreme Lord of all things, that His Christ is the King of Glory who overcame death and crushed the devil, that His Church is the Queen of Immense Majesty, capable of rising again from amid the ruins, dissipating all darkness, and shining with an even more resplendent triumph precisely when the most terrible and most irremediable defeat seems to await her.